By African American Policy Forum | with
thanks to NewBlackMan (in
Exile)

Thursday, July 23, 2015.

Sandra Bland, the
28-year old Black woman from Naperville, Illinois, who was arrested for
allegedly assaulting a police officer during a traffic stop in Waller County,
Texas on July 10 and was found dead in a jail cell three days later, is the
latest victim of police brutality against African American women, says Columbia
Law School Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, a leading authority on how
law and society are shaped by race and gender.

In honor of Bland, and to continue to call
attention to violence against Black women in the U.S., the African American
Policy Forum, the Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies at
Columbia Law School, and Andrea Ritchie, Soros Justice Fellow and expert on
policing of women and LGBT people of color, have updated a report first issued
in May, 2015, “Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality Against Black
Women.” The new version includes the circumstances around Bland’s
suspicious death—which is being investigated by the Texas Rangers in
coordination with the FBI—and documents stories of Black women who have been
killed by police, shining a spotlight on forms of police brutality often
experienced disproportionately by women of color.

Say Her Name is intended to serve as a resource for
the media, organizers, researchers, policy makers, and other stakeholders to
better understand and address Black women’s experiences of profiling and
policing.

“Although Black women are routinely killed, raped,
and beaten by the police, their experiences are rarely foregrounded in popular
understandings of police brutality,” said Crenshaw, director of Columbia Law
School’s Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies and co-author
of the report. “Yet, inclusion of Black women’s experiences in social
movements, media narratives, and policy demands around policing and police
brutality is critical to effectively combatting racialized state violence for
Black communities and other communities of color.”

In addition to stories of Black women who have been
killed by police and who have experienced gender-specific forms of police
violence, Say Her Name provides some analytical frames for understanding their
experiences and broadens dominant conceptions of who experiences state violence
and what it looks like.

“Black women are all too often unseen in the
national conversation about racial profiling, police brutality, and lethal
force,” said Ritchie, co-author of the report. “This report begins to shine a
light on the ways that Black women are policed similar to other members of our
communities, whether it’s police killings, ‘stop and frisk,’ ‘broken windows
policing,’ or the ‘war on drugs.’ It also pushes open the frame to include
other forms and contexts of police violence such as sexual assault by police,
police abuse of pregnant women, profiling and abusive treatment of lesbian,
bisexual, transgender, and gender nonconforming Black women, and police
brutality in the context of responses to violence—which bring Black women’s
experiences into even sharper focus.”

In 2015 alone, at least six Black women have been
killed by or after encounters with police. For instance, just before Freddie
Gray’s case grabbed national attention, police killed unarmed Mya Hall—a Black
transgender woman—on the outskirts of Baltimore. Alleged to be driving a stolen
car, Hall took a wrong turn onto NSA property and was shot to death by officers
after the car crashed into the security gate and a police cruiser. No action
has been taken to date with respect to the officers responsible for her death.
In April, police fatally shot Alexia Christian while she was being handcuffed
in the back of a police cruiser. And in March in Ventura, California, police
officers shot and killed Meagan Hockaday—a young mother of three—within 20
seconds of entering her home in response to a domestic disturbance.

#SayHerName responds to increasing calls for
attention to police violence against Black women by offering a resource to help
ensure that Black women’s stories are integrated into demands for justice,
policy responses to police violence, and media representations of victims and
survivors of police brutality.

The brief concludes with recommendations for
engaging communities in conversation and advocacy around Black women’s
experiences of police violence, considering race and gender in policy
initiatives to combat state violence, and adopting policies to end sexual abuse
and harassment by police officers.